‘Labels are for cans,’ yet you do see ‘trans’
The ‘soup can logic’ of using ‘trans’ but not ‘cis’. When people aren’t comfortable observing that some people are cis, often their discomfort rests in a belief that trans people aren’t people but soup cans.
3 strategies to fight transphobia
From ‘El terfismo en América Latina,’ an article in Volcánicas. Expose TERF connections to the Religious Right, multinational companies, neoliberal regimes & white supremacy. Give trans people platforms. Keep at it.
Nervous about sharing your uninformed opinion? Then don’t
Feel relieved? Good. But it was never about your feelings. “Just asking questions!” isn’t credible when the speaker is demonstrably not naive. Lots of people know lots of real information about trans kids.
Telling LGBTQ people what to do
One part of what the #IStandWithJKRowling hashtag means. LGBTQ-phobia is identifiable when someone who’s wholly uninformed about and unsympathetic to our perspectives demands that we behave a certain way.
On ‘Transexualidades’ by Miquel Missé
Book #2 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Missé is interested in “transexualidad,” which operates along “various paradigms” and a “history full of conquests, paradoxes, myths and frustrations.”
On ‘Cistem Failure’ by Marquis Bey
Book #1 in my 2023 Trans Rights Readathon week. Marquis Bey says that cisgender is a “categorical ruse disingenuously hailing those who nevertheless do not and cannot sit comfortably within it.”
Can an identity be true and not true?
On ‘constitutive tension’ in our concepts. Picking apart someone else’s identity? First ask: Why do you want to? What would be gained? And lost? What happens to your own identity in the process?
Everything is subjective and contains its opposite
This is not a reason to reject trans people and their language. They’re using shared language in an off-center way because the shared language doesn’t center them . Not their fault. Should they reinvent language?
Transphobia speaks in the voice of surveillance capitalism
It believes it knows, and can shape, who we are and what we’ll do. Surveillance capitalists believe in determinism, not free will. Transphobes, taking their cue, reject the gender freedom by which some of us are trans.
Skeptical of trans people above all
They could have been skeptical of science denialism and supernaturalism instead. Some theories, beliefs, and agendas are false, and their falseness merits skepticism. But trans people are real. We shouldn’t be the object of skepticism.